Dear colleagues
Although it would be nice to write here in French, I chose English to reach a greater audience.
One of the reasons which gave me the idea to found this group, is my lecture of rather ignorant reviews of Bryan Gillingham's book "Music in the Cluniac Ecclesia", published in 2006. Words like "wishful thinking" somehow disguised the reviewers, because I think historiography is always based on a large part on exactly that. But I hesitated, because it gives me no pleasure to expose other colleagues here and according to my experience poor knowledge about the historical context and an obsessive fixation on codicological questions about destination are usually the reason, why musicologists often miss new historical evidence.
I opened this group instead also to inform about historical studies beyond the musicological focus like Cluny studies. At the end, coming once more in touch with Aquitanian sources in order to study neglected traditions in Southern Italy, I learnt soon, it is not just about Cluny as centre of liturgical reforms, but also about a distorted view on the Saint Martial school which is still visible at the New Grove's Dictionary's entry "St Martial" (trying hard to avoid the term "school") written by two authors, highly competent in the topic: Alejandro Planchart and Sarah Fuller.
Both approaches were excellent, but they never met and tried to puzzle their pieces together!
Planchart's focus went far beyond the scriptorium and the library collection of the Abbey Saint Martial, including manuscripts from Albi, Narbonne and Saint Yrieix which have nothing in common except the Aquitanian neumes and the aesthetics of book-painting, but already the discussion of new genres which replaced tropus and sequentiae, did not explain well enough what they really are, and what these changes meant for the local repertories. Sarah Fuller on the other hand was responsible for the section 3 "Polyphony" and tried hard to focus on this subject without any concern, how the focus of Aquitanian cantors developed from monophonic compositions rather later to certain forms of polyphony which were beyond the early organa collections of Winchester, Fleury, Chartres and Paris.
Meanwhile studies in related fields (like Occitan studies) brought further pieces of the puzzle together and my idea was to make some further steps, favourably with your active participation.
I fear the main occupation of the musicological focus avoids impulses from outside, such as Dominique Iogna-Prat's French publication dating already back to 1998, and made available by an English translation of Graham Edwards published three years later:
Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l'hérésie, au judaisme et à Islam, 1000 - 1150 (Paris: Aubier 1998). ISBN 978-2-7007-2287-1. Table des matières.
Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order & exclusion: Cluny and Christendom face heresy, Judaism, and Islam 1000-1150. Conjunctions of religion & power in the medieval past. transl. by Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP 2002). ISBN 978-0-8014-3708-3. gb.
You can see that the author, director of the CNRS, had very creative ideas to integrate contemporary philosophical discourses such as the celestial and ecclesiastic hierarchies with the final conclusion about the superiority of Christianity which is well reflected by political history. But even if one is seduced to regard the plurilingual translation project at Toledo as part of the Reconquista, one must take into account the earlier one in Córdoba and about the same time (and in open rivalry) the one in Baghdad mainly focussed on Persian and Greek sources. This includes a comparison with the phlosophy of Ibn Arabī, Jelal ad-Din Rumi, Abu Huseyn an-Nuri, Abu Hamid al-Ǧazali or the Persian poet Suhrawardi (a victim of the son of Sultan Saladin), and it was rather unlikely that Pierre le Vénérable's level of philosophical reflection considering various religious ideas would turn out as superior or could ever compete with the achieved level of reciprocal tolerance of these philosophers, not all of them contemporary, but well-known about his time.
Now, almost thirty years later, I could observe a negative impact of this book among historians and the author is hardly the one to be blamed for it. They all talk now about Pierre le Vénérable's "Latin translation of the Quran" (which was even taken as the basis of a Latin edition "directed by him" [! Historiography is when the dead bury the living…]), and today one cannot even say "without any mention", but rather without any awareness that his treatise became only possible thanks to the inter-confessional translation project at Toledo, a late activity of the Andalusia divided into Taifa kingdoms.
It also supported a new kind of inter-religious polemics, and John of Damascus' Greek sermons "On holy images and those who are tempted to decree about them" became a very popular model of argumentation even for Mozarabic authors.
The author Iogna-Prat in the tradition of Marc Bloch, Marie-Dominique Chenu and Georges Duby used Pierre's polemic letters against various religions as a document of contemporary intolerance and violence written by a mediocrite theologian who had an impact on the political history of crusades, but also on the sociological fact that monastic communities had been bullied under the impact of the Cluniac Monastic Association which turned an abbot at Cluny into a powerful man.
The group here had other topics closer to monasticism like the monumental project (preceding Cluny 3) to build up Saint Bénigne at Dijon under abbot Willelmus of Volpiano who became later founding abbot in Normandy. Long before Iogna-Prat Michel Huglo (1982) described conflicts at the Abbey Saint-Maur-des-Fossés near Paris which were caused by an abbot who was educated as cantor at Cluny.
Such a conflict existed only indirectly at Limoges, but it is the background of the biography of Adémar de Chabannes who nourished similar ambitions, even before Saint Martial got the rank of an Abbey. Neither his uncle Roger nor him were the inventors of diastematic Aquitanian notation nor the local type of tonary, but as careful notators they developed and improved them to become better readable. They both belonged to an older generation mainly occupied by the redaction of local manuscripts, the adaptation and composition of sequentiae and proper mass chant tropes of the local school—a local school with an over-regional impact on Aquitaine, but not over a mass medium as Grier's allusion to Marshall McLuhan's media theory suggested, but within a secret script only known among highly educated cantors as notators.
The fact that all these compositions were abandoned, does not make them less part of the local heritage. Even Adémar's promotion of the local patron as apostle was successful, but musicologists do not like forgers (although forging history had been one of the main activities of monastic chroniclers) and do not consider the time it takes to reach such a rank. The "lack of success" results from a liturgical reform by Cluny which abandoned the local repertories of sequentiae and proper tropes in favour for a new experimental genre called "versus" and new form of Marian devotion which expressed itself even in the local language Occitan.
This was often misunderstood as a lack of a local focus. Musicologists were simply overcharged by the so-called "versaria" known as "Saint-Martial A-D", because they were simply libelli for exceptional needs on higher feasts, and there were not many when such an extravagance was needed and thus, new compositions were added where space was left in the manuscripts. These manuscripts were the most complicated to study and the first generation had lunatic ideas about them to regard them as one unit which seduced James Grier in his earlier studies to develop a theory of stemma. This theory even prevented him from the most plausible conclusions such as that a cantor who confused both parts notating hidden polyphony, did obviously not copy from another manuscript, but notated the own perception of a local composition after having listened to two cantors performing it.
But these are circumstances which prove the presence of a local school. And concerning Limoges even an exchange with local trobadours is documented, who even integrated as a long-term development local forms of Marian devotion in a vernacular context (O'Sullivan 2013).
But those musicologists who learnt their lesson studying the versaria of the early 12th and 13th centuries, are also well prepared to describe the contemporary manuscripts of the new Norman churches constructed on the island of Sicily.
Those who studied with me, will remember the bad circumstances to study Aquitanian versaria, if you had not been directly at the National Library in Paris to study the original. It was thanks to a professor at the Humboldt-University who had this opportunity, that I could ask the librarian to spend a lot of money to buy the facsimilia of the four manuscripts made by Gillingham's Institute of Medieval Music which are probably the worst readable bw reproductions I have ever seen in my life. Some manuscripts need a very experienced photographer to get some nice pictures where you can also see something.
Thus, please be aware how privileged you are today to have the coloured reproductions made available by Gallica. Thanks to them, it is possible to understand the music directly from the contemporary notation without any intervention of a transcription into Western staff notation with or without rhythm.
Remark: The encyclopaedic articles linked within the text had been brought to the current level of research by myself. I count on your kind collaboration.
References
Crocker, Richard L. (2001). "Versus (Lat.)". Grove Music Online. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.29247.
Fuller, Sarah (1979). "The Myth of 'Saint Martial' Polyphony–A Study of the Sources". Musica Disciplina. 33:5–26. jstor.
Gillingham, Bryan (2006). Music in the Cluniac Ecclesia: A Pilot Project. Ottawa: IMM. ISBN 978-1896926735.
Grier, James (1995). "Roger de Chabannes (d. 1025), Cantor of St Martial, Limoges". Early Music History. 14: 53–119. doi:10.1017/s0261127900001443.
———, (2005). "The Musical Autographs of Adémar de Chabannes (989–1034)". Early Music History. 24: 125–168. doi:10.1017/S0261127905000100.
———, (2006). The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in eleventh-century Aquitaine. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo: Cambridge UP. ISBN 9780521856287. gb.
Huglo, Michel (1982). « Les débuts de la polyphonie à Paris : les premiers organa parisiens ». Forum Musicologicum — Basler Studien zur Musikgeschichte. 3:94–163. Rob C. Wegman made his fine English translation of this essay available at his homepage.
O'Sullivan, Daniel E. (2013). "Na Maria: Shaping Marian Devotion in Old Occitan Song". In Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Laurie Shepard (ed.). Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. Gallica. Vol. 28. Cambridge, Mass.: D. S. Brewer. pp. 183–200. ISBN 978-1-84384-335-1. jstor.
Planchart, Alejandro Enrique; Fuller, Sarah (2001). "St Martial". Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford UP. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40296.
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